This is another in a series of HDR images that I shot at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Once again the location was the Armington & Sims machine shop. I love the look of the old, oiled, metal of the vintage machinery. I think this type of material really works well with HDR. My goal was to really focus in on one element of the machine, in this case a crank handle, possibly used to operate a vise-like component, but I’m not sure. In comparison with one of the ‘as-shot’ images, I think this shot really brings out the details.

The Armington & Sims machine shop in Greenfield Village was built in 1929. It was named after a maker of steam engines in Providence, Rhode Island. The building houses a working machine shop which would have been used as a ‘job’ shop to build and repair various parts for industry. The shop was originally powered by steam, with the steam engine sending its power to the machinery via a system of belts and pulleys. If you look near the top of the image, you can see a series of pulley wheels and their belts which power the machines to the right. Today the shop it powered by electricity. While primarily an exhibit of what a machine shop would have been like in the day, the shop is still used to produce parts for items needed in the village and museum.

I was looking through my Lightroom catalog trying to find images which might be fun to play with using the Silver Efex Pro plugin I just purchased. As I scanned across the folders, I found a series of images that I had taken at the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit, Michigan. The building is famous for both its beauty and sorry condition. It has been threatened with demolition, and yet it still stands. Several movies have been shot here and it is a popular place for urbex photographers to visit.

I’ve been doing black and white conversions in Photoshop for some time now, but I’ve always been interested in the results I’ve seen from Nik’s Silver Efex Pro plugin. Well, I finally took the plunge and purchased it. As a quick test of the software I decided to try it out on an image I had been playing around with.

The picture shows the Greyhound bus depot in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The depot itself was built around 1940 in the Streamline Moderne style. I’ve always enjoyed the look of this building, although its a shame that it hasn’t been kept in better shape. I took this picture on an early morning walk I made around town a couple of months ago.

For the past few days I’ve been playing with a Nikon 24mm PC-E lens. I like to shoot architecture and I thought it would be fun to try a lens which would let me do some perspective correction in camera rather than in Photoshop. I still have a lot to learn about using this lens, but I really like it (which I could afford one). This shot of the new North Quad dormitory on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor was taken with this lens. I was lazy and shot this hand held. With a 24mm lens I was able to capture most of the building without tilting the camera too much, and then I used the shift capability to reduce any keystoning. The nice thing about being able to do this optically is you keep the full resolution of the image rather than stretching/compressing pixels in Photoshop.

This is another shot of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan. While spending time on the island, I took a walk one morning hoping to get a morning shot of the hotel. The morning had been cloudy and rainy but as I left my hotel room the sky started to clear up. The island isn’t very big, particularly the ‘downtown’ area, so it didn’t take me long to walk from my hotel across town and up the hill to get to the Grand Hotel. I took a few shots as the sun came out from behind the clouds but I noticed that the flags which normally adorn the porch weren’t flying. Somehow it made the hotel look a little to plain. As I was shooting, I noticed these gentlemen starting to put the flags out on the porch. I thought it made for an interesting shot.

The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island is an impressive structure built by the Mackinac Island Hotel Company which was formed by a group including the Michigan Central Railroad, Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad, and the Detroit and Cleveland Steamship Navigation Company. The idea was to promote tourism to the island in northern Michigan and encourage people to travel using the railroads and steamships of the owning companies. The hotel boasts the longest porch. Of course, these days you have to pay $10 to walk on the porch if you aren’t a guest of the hotel. The hotel maintains some quaint traditions, such as requiring gentlemen to wear coats after 6:30 pm and women to wear dresses or pant suits. Other than the expense, its one of the reasons I’ve never stayed there.

One of the things I like to do in my spare time is wander around the University of Michigan campus looking for photo opportunities. It’s particularly nice in the late spring and summer when the students are away. Recently on one of my walks I took this shot of Burton Tower. I have a thing for high contrast and raking light and I liked how the sun was shining on the tower. I really would have preferred to take this shot from a higher point, but I didn’t have access to one so I simply backed up about as far as I could and then zoomed in on the upper portion of the tower.

My wife and I have been visiting the Good Hart area in northern lower Michigan on and off for many years. We used to rent a house on Lake Michigan in an area known as Middle Village. Almost across the road from the house we rented was an old, decaying structure. It wasn’t until this year that I actually bothered to take some pictures of it. Given the state of decay I wouldn’t be surprised if the building is gone in the next few years. Middle Village itself was originally an Ottawa Indian village. A Jesuit Mission was established at Middle Village in 1741 and was rebuilt by Native Americans in 1823. A church, built in 1889 and a cemetary remain. The church is still used during the summer. Some additional information about the area can be found here.

I figured that after a series of asylum pictures it might be nice to do something completely different. This shot was taken a couple of years ago when my family and I returned from a trip. The picture shows the tunnel which connects Concourse C to the main McNamara Terminal at Detroit’s Metro Airport. The tunnel is quite interesting. There is ambient music playing in the background and they use continually change the color of the lights. There are two long moving sidewalks which pass by long panels of glass sculpture. It’s a really nice change of pace from the typical chaos found in airports.